


In Absence

by givemeunicorns



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Implied Poe Dameron/Finn/Rey, Multi, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rey loses a hand, Rey-Centric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-20
Updated: 2016-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-15 02:39:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5768146
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/givemeunicorns/pseuds/givemeunicorns
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In typical Star Wars fashion, Rey loses a her hand in battle. In not so typical Star Wars fashion, she actually deals with it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Absence

**Author's Note:**

> Prompted to me via tumblr. I will be honest here, while I am a long time Star Wars fan, but I don't really know that much about the universe, so if I messed something up, please be gentle with me.

There was a moment were everything froze, where the world screamed itself out into sudden silence and nothing existed but the erratic ark of a red blade. There was no pain, even as she watched it happen, watched the Knight's red saber slice through her flesh and bone, half way between her wrist and elbow. She watched her own saber fall into the dust.

Behind the black mask, the knight of Ren laughed. This one was not like Kylo Ren, the first Jedi she had fought, the one she longed to fight again, with his rage that burned hotter and brighter than anything she had ever felt, a light that something inside her begged her to put out, in an act of mercy if nothing else. This one though, this one was cold.

She tucked her useless stump against her chest and rolled for the ground, the way she practiced a million times, narrowly avoiding the ark of a killing blow. She called to the saber and it answered, as it always did, flying it her remaining hand. She gained her feet again, spinning her body, throwing her weight behind the almost weightless saber, bearing her blow down on her opponent like a storm. The Knights of Ren fought with their sabers as if they were ancient things of unwieldy metal, but rarely did they expect their opponents to do the same. Master Luke had schooled his padawan well. The knight of Ren was not laughing now. He dodged her blow and feinted left, but she save the moving coming, slide her saber along the length of his and pushed him back with a snarl. The stump of her ruined arm began to pulse in a distant agony. The knight staggered back, sensing her weakness, spying the way she her body bent inward. He raised his blade to lop at her head and the trap sprung. Jedi or no, she'd been raised a scavenger, small and sharp and quick on her feet, she lunged, driving the tip of the saber beneath the black helmet and pushed. The Knight of Ren did not even have the chance to scream.

The blade of her saber winked out as she stumbled back. The sand here was darker than the sand on Jakku. The wind blew the send of hot engines and burnt flesh into her face and the world came unseated, her feet unsteady in the dunes. She didn't fight as it pulled her down, the pain of her ruined limb rushing up to meet her.

The world faded to rolling grey, not really there, but she heard the voice in her head again, the voice of the man she'd heard the first time in Maz's cellar. A man she had never met, Obi Wan, Master Luke had called him.

_Come back Rey. Come back._

She blinked, confused at the darkness. She was laying in shadow now, the sun blocked out.

By Finn. He held her half in his lap, calloused fingers pressed into the hollow of her throat, feeling for her pulse.

“Rey,” he said, his relief almost tangible on her tongue, “Are with me?”

She offered a loose nod, felt his fingers slide up into her hair. Beside her, someone was moving, cursing under his breath. Poe. Her arm was shifted and the world came back in suddenly relief as a strangled scream clawed it's way out of her.

“My arm,” she chocked, the searing pain coming alive again, like a thousand bunring needles under her skin, “they took my arm.”

“I know,” Finn said, his voice tight, cradling her jaw, not letting her turn towards the ruined limb, “But it's gonna be okay. You're going to be okay. Poe knows what to do for you until we can get you back to base. You just need to stay with us.”

A gloved hand squeezed her shoulder, and the still functioning part of her brain knew it was Poe, and that that mattered, but the fire was flaring up to her shoulder now. It was agony, swallowing up her world, blotting out everything. How had Master Luke endured this? How had he found the strength to hold on? He'd never told her that part of the story, only that the force had led his sister to him. Her fingers tugged at Finn's jacket.

“I'll get her to the ship, you cover,” Poe said and reluctantly, Finn nodded.

She screamed as Poe folded her arm, wrapped in his vest, to her chest, lifting her out of Finn's lap.

“You're gonna be okay,” he huffed, taking off with her at a run, slipping in the sand.

Typical fly boy, she thought to herself. One day she'd teach him to run on uncertain ground.

~~~~~  
The wound had been cauterized by the saber itself, but the shock had taken it's toll on her her. It left her exhausted and shaking for days, her nose constantly filled with the smell of her own burnt flesh. She couldn't bring herself to look at the stump where her hand had been.

She wasn't a scavenger anymore, her life didn't depend on two flesh and blood hands. The resistance, even with their limited resources, had the brains and the resources to give her some sort of functionality again.

Still, she couldn't unsee it, the red blade in the hand of a faceless knight, cutting through her, taking a part of her. They were always taking, that was their way. Kylo Ren had pushed into her mind, he'd stolen her certainty. He'd stolen the childish innocence that believed the stories of the Jedi, of good and right nights. He'd stolen Han from her, now this one had taken her very flesh.

The tears were miserable; hot, angry tears that she couldn't stop no matter how hard she tried. She had killed her opponent, but they'd still taken from her. How many lives had they stolen, how many bodies had they ruined before her? It was what the Sith had always done. It was what the dark side had always done. How could you fight a power that never stopped destroying, that never stopped taking, always hungry?

Finn wiped at the tears, held her good hand in his own, fingers playing in her hair, tracing the bones of her wrists. The grief on him was almost palpable and that hurt her almost as much as the hand. Finn was fixer, he was the sort of soul so brimming with compassion that he desperately wanted to put people back togther, to save them. Even he couldn't fix this, couldn't make this better, couldn't soothe the angry restlessness it had lite up inside her soul. Still he stayed, slept by her bedside until Poe coxed him away.

Poe was good at that, and she was grateful for it. She could see it killed him to leave her, to get Finn to leave her, but he understood. He seemed to get that sometimes you needed your own loneliness, that the weight of all that caring wasn't always easy to bear.

She spent too long staring at the ceiling, rhythmically tapping the mattress with fingers she knew were no longer there. She could still feel it sometimes, the clenching of a phantom fist.

Then of the sudden, the feeling ebbed away, and the emptiness poured in.

_It will get easier in time, my young padawan_

Rey sighed, scrubbed at the tears with her good hand. Shouldn't couldn't really hear him in her head, not so much feel him, the familiar energy reaching out to her from where ever he had gone off to this time. Absently, she fingered the braid behind her ear. One day, she would be a Jedi. Loss was their way. Fear, selfishness, those lead only to the dark side, and yet such darkness lived in all things. Even Jedi.

As a child, the Knights of old had seemed so surreal, so infallible. She understood now why they were just stories. The Jedi had never been those who had overcome the darkness of the world, they were those who endured it within themselves.

~~~~~~~~

Good as new.

Just like the real thing.

That's what they say about the hand. It's all shit.

With out the supplies of the Republic, there is no synthetic skin to cover the metal skeleton. No kind words or well meaning smiles make it less grotesque, all the wires and metal bits protruding from the ruined stump of her arm. She knows there are others with a mechanical arm or leg or eye, but maybe she'd spent too long scavenging to appreciate the apparatus as anything more than ramshackle spare parts.

It helped her hold a saber, or fly a ship, or climb a ladder. But it wasn't real, it wasn't her, not really. It couldn't feel the warmth or smoothness of Finn's cheek or the softness of Poe's curls. It could move and grip, but she couldn't feel the weight of their hand in hers.

She held the skeletal limb in front of her face, watching the starlight glint of the dark metal, the way the wires and mechanism moved when she clenched and unclenched her fist. She could feel it, the pull of skin, the tensing and loosening of muscles, the press of her fingernails into her palm. She knew it wasn't real, but it felt real, as real as breathing. She dreaded the moment when the false feeling would go away, when the emptiness would come back. That was worse, watching the hand move, move because the muscles it was anchored to told it to.

She felt her master before she heard him, pushing back his cloak to sit next to her on the grass.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, looking up at the sky too.

“Sometimes,” she said, after a long moment.

“Mine did too, for a long time after it happened. I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking my hand had cramped only to remember it wasn't there anymore.”

He held his arm out to the moon light too. General Organa said that, once, he'd had it covered, with artificial skin or a glove. Rey thought about a glove. She kept her arms covered all the time anyway, maybe no one would question it.

“It get better,” he said, “easier. It's still a part of you that's missing, that's still terrifying, but you realize even without a hand, you're somehow still whole. Eventually, people will leave well enough alone. The hovering will cease and the pitying looks will fade away.”

Rey sat up, wrapping her whole arm around herself.

“What about the nightmares?” she whispered, catching his eye.

Luke was an odd sort of man. Even after all that time alone, there was an open sort of kindness to him. She knew if she asked him a question, he'd give her the answer, even if it wasn't what she wanted to hear. He was a good teacher, because she could trust that he would never lie to her.

“Mostly they do. I haven't had one in years,” he said, his smile gentle, understanding, “it will take time, my young padwan. I know patience isn't your strong suit, but I know your heart. I know you know how to wait. It doesn't make you weak, to be afraid, it doesn't make you less.”

“Fear is the path to the dark side,” she mumbled into her elbow. She'd read the teachings of master yoda over and over again once she'd been able to make sense of the letter.

Luke's metal fingers rested on her shoulder, squeezing it gently.

“Master Yoda was very wise, but he was also very old. He'd lived so long, I think, he forgot what it was to be young, to be afraid. Fear is normal, we all feel it, even Jedi. It's learning to do what you must, despite your fear, that makes you good, that calls you back to the light. Fear only leads to the dark side, if you let it win.”

~~~

“Does it bother you?”

“Does what bother me?” Finn asked, nothing but his dangling feet visible from within the guts of the Falcon.

She tinkered with the part in her lap a bit, mostly just to see what would happen.

“My hand,” she said quietly. Claiming it as part of her was still new, still uncomfortable, but the doctor told her it would get easier in time.

Finn's head popped out of the hatch, brows pulled togther, the way they always did when he was worried.

“It bothers me that someone hurt you, if that's what you mean.”

“Never mind,” she huffed, already regretting her words.

Finn slithered out of the Falcon's underbelly.

“Rey,” he started gently, coming to sit close enough that their thigh's touched, “I'm never going to forget what it was like, watching that bastard take your hand, how sick and weak you were after. How scared I was that I might lose you.”

He reached over, taking the metal fingers and lacing them with his own.

“But this? This is a part of you. I love every part of you, metal or flesh or whatever,” he shrugged, fixing her with that open, honest gaze that made her eyes sting, “it's still you.”

 


End file.
